What is the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing

Marketing is an essential part of any business. Successful marketing helps attract more customers towards your goods and services and keeps them coming back for more. There are two types of marketing: traditional and digital.

Traditional marketing is a conventional method of marketing that involves advertising through traditional media such as magazines, telephone, newspaper, radio, TV, flyers, brochures etc. Methods of traditional marketing can include print advertisements like newsletters, billboards, flyers and newspaper print ads. Other forms of traditional marketing include television spots or commercials, as well as radio spots. Most traditional marketing strategies fall under one of four categories: print, broadcast, direct mail, and telephone.

Digital Marketing, on the other hand, is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies i.e. electronic devices, to reach consumers. It includes all sorts of marketing that use digital media like search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), influencer marketing, data-driven marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click advertising (PPC), affiliate marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, email direct marketing, etc. It also extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as mobile phones (SMS and MMS) and callback.

Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing

In this age of rapid technological advancement, digital marketing is gaining popularity over traditional marketing. The customization and targeting features it offers has given new age marketers a control over their expenditure.

Let’s take a look at the major differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing.

You can never understand the exact reach of your marketing. What you can understand is the impact you make, even that a rough calculation after a long time.

With technical algorithms and facilities to measure general trends, inbound traffic, conversion rate and many more, the reach and result of your marketing can be measured pretty quickly.

Publicity

The publicity goes only as far as the target audience.

With shares and comments and other facilities of digital media, the reach goes beyond your target audience to all potential audience.

You cannot directly interact with the target audience. Feedbacks take time and you need to wait to take the next step.

You can interact with your audience in real time and hence get quick and precise feedback.

Acceptance

Since traditional marketing has been around for a long time, it will be easily accepted by the audience.

People who are not familiar with digital media, find it hard to understand and therefore take time to accept.

Even though digital marketing is the main form of marketing for many companies, traditional marketing is still required. Business usually take an integrated approach, using a mix of digital and traditional methods that best suits their needs. Thus, when you try to make business strategies, you must first have clarity about your target audience and then chose the right promotional mix. For this, you need to have a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of traditional and digital media.

Customer engagement is about encouraging your customers to interact and share in the experiences you create for them as a business and a brand. When executed well, a strong customer engagement strategy will foster brand growth and loyalty.